The Zone of Interest

Dir. Jonathan Glazer. 2023, U.K./U.S./Poland, 105 mins. In German and Polish with English subtitles. In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality. It’s summer in the mid-1940s, and a German family merrily idles by a river. Father Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and mother Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tuck their kids in bed at night. They entertain family and guests in their vast backyard garden on the weekends. In the mornings, she oversees chores with a cadre of housekeepers and cooks; he goes to work as head Commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Their domestic life is paradisiacal. Yet over the wall abutting their home, we can see smokestacks, and at night we hear screams and occasional gunshots. Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity, filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. An A24 release. 

Preceded by  

Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” 

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 2023, France/Belgium, 20 mins. In French with English subtitles. At the time of his death in September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had been in the midst of planning another feature, an adaptation of Belgian author Charles Plisnier’s 1937 novel Faux Passports. Though the film was not fated to be, the intricate and beautiful “trailer” that Godard put together in preparation now stands as his final work, a complex collage of history, politics, and cinema constructed of paper and glue, paintings and photographs, sound and silence. A Kino Lorber release. 

Tickets: $30 / discounted for MoMI and NYFF members ($25). Advance tickets for this screening are no longer available. Limited standby tickets may become available at the door.

Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. Review safety protocols before your visit.